In her classic study The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to
American Fiction (1977), Judith Fetterley declares that the "major
works of American fiction constitute a series of designs on the female
reader." Discerning the designs of the canon of male American texts, the
feminist critic must, argues Fetterley, "become a resisting rather than
an assenting reader," since much male writing is hostile to women and their
interests. What happens, then, when the feminist reader senses that there
is danger in the designs of works by American women writers? This question
has arisen with a kind of vengeance as the process of recovering the wealth
of writing by nineteenth-century women presents readers with an entirely
different canon (and, for that matter, with different versions of the canon
of nineteenth-century women writers).

While the process of recovery seems to require a certain amount of advocacy
or partisanship, or at least a suspension of disbelief, once we turn from
doing scholarship and literary history and start writing criticism we find
resistance shadows appreciation. Literature by nineteenth-century women
has designs upon its readers, and not all of these will be welcome to us
as we move into the twenty-first century. A continuing challenge for feminist
criticism has become, indeed, clarifying what it means for a feminist reader
to resist a woman's text, and what consequences this has for scholarship
and literary history and the writing of criticism. In my talk I will offer
a few examples as provocation to further discussion. I do so not because
this problem is peculiar to feminism or to the field of nineteenth century
women's writing; on the contrary, the problem here is exemplary of a much
more widespread phenomenon today, as the general commitment to being resisting
readers runs into the general commitment to being advocates of the previously
unheard or marginalized.

In sum, the questions I would like to offer for exploration could be
put in the following way:

1. Once I have become a resisting reader, what is at stake when
I begin to resist the very works whose recovery I have supported and celebrated?
How do I see the relation of resistance to the work of criticism, and how
does this relation complicate my idea of the cultural work the text performed,
or the cultural work I think I am performing?

2. Do I recover, study, and teach only those texts that appear
to support my current set of values? Does this create a strong enough foundation
for an alternative canon? And if I choose to recover texts that violate
my values or offend others, how do I present and teach them, and what cultural
work do I think I am accomplishing in the process?

I want to begin by briefly putting the question of the reader's resistance
in relation to what we now call "cultural work" theory. Contemporary "cultural
work" criticism, I would argue, owes a good deal to feminist theory, and
shares with it certain problems. Fetterley's emphasis on the power of literary
texts to shape the beliefs and actions of readers and whole societies helped
start a wave of literary criticism now associated with the term "cultural
work" (see also Lauter, Davidson). Instead of producing technical descriptions
or aesthetic appreciations of literary forms, this kind of analysis aims
to produce an account of the cultural work done by texts as they make their
way into the minds of readers and cultures. According to the cultural work
thesis, we should reconstruct literary history (and our syllabi) by studying
the cultural work that texts have done - for the people who wrote them,
published them, sold them, bought them, read them, borrowed them, or wrote
about them. The cultural work thesis is attractive because it seems to
end-run interminable debates about literary value - about which are the
best timeless works to study and teach. Now we choose, well, not every
text that was published, but at least everything influential.

Measuring the cultural work done by a text is a bit tricky. Obviously
one can try to document and interpret the sales, reception, use, and popularity
of texts, contextualizing their cultural work both empirically and ideologically
(though Davidson smartly shows how difficult this is to do with any great
confidence). Yet one can also make a case for the overlooked and unread,
as in arguments that a widely ignored book - such as Walden or Our
Nig - can nonetheless be a solid indicator of the contemporary cultural
work done by the kind of representational ideologies it uses or expresses,
such as those regarding race, industry, and religion. In other words, the
cultural work of overlooked texts may belong to the political unconscious
of a group or era or period. So understood, the cultural work of a text
seems to slip back into the category of the "representative," and we assign
it less because of the work it did than because it represents the cultural
imaginary of its period or place.

The hierarchy of works created by cultural work methods appears more
democratic than in the aesthetic model. It allows us to respect the audience
that bought Susan Warner's Wide, Wide World and preferred Ruth
Hallto The Scarlet Letter. It also prompts us to question the
discipline that delegitimated the extraordinarily influential Uncle
Tom's Cabin while simultaneously resuscitating Moby Dick decades
after readers had apparently decided that it did no useful work for them.
But we soon run once more into the problem of what kind of cultural work
we value, whether among the texts we assign or those we write about, and
this decision is inseparable from our agonizing over what kind of cultural
work our own performances as scholars, critics, and teachers are doing.
Claims to "critical" or "radical" pedagogy are claims about the kind of
cultural work done by professional educators and academic writers. I may
at times confuse the cultural work of the texts and authors I study with
the cultural work accomplished by my own syllabus, journal article, or
critical study. In my desire to be a resisting reader or resisting scholar,
I may choose to privilege those texts that I think embody the kind of resistance
I myself value, and I will resist those texts whose cultural work (in the
past, present, or future) I perceive as a threat to my own values.

Even the best revisionists have trouble denying that the texts they
choose to study are the texts that do the kind of cultural work that they,
today, as politicized academics and citizens, want to see done. (Of course,
many wouldn't think of such a denial, and make this claim an explicit part
of their method.) I may assign women writers and writers of color not only
because I respect and want to teach the struggles they undertook, but because
I see such teaching as integral to our own struggles today against racism
and sex discrimination. In time this means that as our own ideas about
how to conduct such struggles change, as they inevitably will, our evaluation
of past writers will alter as well. Where once a text or author was an
effective source of resistance, she now may be an encumbrance; or where
once a mode of ideology seemed to promise liberation, we now see it as
a trap. Our twenty-first century accounts of nineteenth-century women writers,
then, may depend largely on the kind of cultural work we want such accounts
to produce, and on our perception of the usefulness of specific nineteenth-century
texts to that scenario.

In her Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction
1790-1860 (1985), Jane Tompkins echoes (but does not cite or footnote)
Fetterley's theory that American literary texts constitute a "series of
designs on female readers," though now the focus is more on texts written
by women. Tompkins's subtitle explicitly ties her brand of reader response
theory to the cultural work movement, bridging the kind of historical scholarship
already done by Nina Baym in Woman's Fiction (1978) with the critical
methods of the New Historicism. Tompkins finesses the question of resistance
through her announced intention "to recreate, as sympathetically as possible,
the context from which [novels by nineteenth-century women] sprang and
the specific problems to which they were addressed. I have therefore not
criticized the social and political attitudes that motivated these writers,
but have tried instead to inhabit and make available to a modern audience
the viewpoint from which their politics made sense." (xiii).

This kind of sympathy is in accord with the general spirit of appreciation
that runs through much of the movement to "recover" lost or marginalized
literatures, a spirit quite different from the spirit of critique that
energizes deconstructions of patriarchal writing. I assume that everyone
in this room is aware of the revolution that Tompkins's book helped produce
in our evaluation of what is termed "sentimental" fiction, whose reversal
of fortune has been mirrored by revisionist revaluations of the cultural
work of nineteenth-century domestic ideology. Domestic ideology and the
sentimental, it is argued, did powerful work in expressing women's lives,
in bonding women with each other, and in making women effective agents
for social and political change. But do we study sentimental literature
because of its objective historical influence or because its ideology may
be in conformity with our own? Tompkins's concluding pages seem to want
to have it both ways. On the one hand, she states that "I see them as doing
a certain kind of cultural work within a specific historical situation,
and value them for that reason." Yet the "historical situation" of the
nineteenth century gives way, in her final sentence, to the specific historical
situation of today, as Tompkins draws a clear, identificatory parallel
between her own cultural work and the cultural work of the writers she
studies: "The struggle now being waged in the professoriate over which
writers deserve canonical status is not just a struggle over the relative
merits of literary geniuses; it is a struggle among contending factions
for the right to be represented in the picture America draws of itself"
(200-01). According to Tompkins, the resistance of the once male-dominated
academy to sentimental literature must itself be resisted. Here, and in
her excellent "afterword" to the reprint of Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide
World, Tompkins urges that our sympathies go to texts whose apparent ideologies
of Christian submission and domestic motherhood can be seen as an empowering
discourse in surprising harmony with the contemporary aims of women's liberation.

Many are aware that Tompkins's way of recovering sentimental literature
has been challenged, and I'll come back to that later in discussing Betsy
Erkkila's recent critiques of feminist literary history. I now want (all
too quickly) to bring Harriet Jacobs into this conversation. While sentimental
fiction such as Warner's has occasioned a good deal of renewed resistance,
Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl has now been canonized,
as the editors of a recent collection of criticism on Jacobs note. The
racism and sexism that consigned this book to oblivion have been overcome,
and Jacobs meets little or no resistance in the critical literature or
the curriculum. (I recognize that many local instances of resistance to
Jacobs can be recounted, but I rely here on the general account of Jacobs's
status presented by Zafar and Garfield.) Judging by the example of Frederick
Douglass, who now regularly comes under attack for his ideas about masculinity
and his later political view, Jacobs will eventually be judged by future
critics as complicit with any number of oppressive ideologies.

While most recovered authors are granted a kind of "honeymoon" away
from critique during their initial re-entry into the canon, Jacobs's strength
as a model of readerly resistance also has its roots in the text. As Hazel
Carby shows, Jacobs's Incidents offers a self-conscious critique of the
"cult of true womanhood" popular among white women such as Warner in the
nineteenth century. While Jacobs uses many of the conventions of sentimental
literature (so much so that her narrative was long taken to be fictional),
she carefully inscribes herself as a resisting reader of master narratives.
In fact, two of the essays in the collection I mentioned have the word
"resistance" in their title. Frances Foster's "Resisting Incidents" provides
an expert summary of the many ways this book was resisted by readers for
over a century. Aware of the popularity today of being resistant readers,
Foster warns that "Although resistance may be absolutely the right way
to read a particular text or a particular author, the fact that literary
productions of African American writers, particularly of those who were
or had been slaves, are habitually greeted with resistance is provoking
and problematic" (58).

In other words, what's good for reading Hawthorne and Fitzgerald is
not so good for reading Jacobs or Harriet Wilson. I think there is good
common sense in this distinction, though I wonder how "absolutely" we can
tell when advocacy or resistance is the "right way to read a particular
text." In Jacobs's case, as Foster, Anne Warner, and others have shown,
the text leads the way because of its many formal resistances and revisions
of dominant narrative and ideological structures, including those of the
seduction novel and domestic fiction. Jacobs announces her self-consciousness
about writing for a white female audience imbued with those traditions
when , in her "Preface" and elsewhere, she notes that the revelations she
will make may well place her beyond the pale of true womanhood in some
people's eyes. Moreover, Jacobs emplots the theme of the resisting reader
when Linda actively refuses the letters her Master thrusts upon her (in
scenes that make the correlation of literary, racial, and phallic violence
all too clear). Later Jacobs becomes the trickster of letters as she disguises
her hand and her notes, sending the evil Flint North in search of her while
all the while she remains secure (if imprisoned) in her garret.

Arguments about how readers have resisted a text, then, quickly become
arguments for the text's intentional strategies of resistance (to the point,
perhaps, that we shouldn't then be surprised when readers resist it). Anne
Warner subtitles her essay "Resistance In Incidents" to stress this focus
on the text's own subversions of master narratives, concluding that "Jacob's
text is decidedly radical and literary, self-consciously intertextual and
signifying . . . . undermining the static notion of a representative heroine.
. . . revers[ing] the conventional closure of the sentimental plot. . .
. deconstruct[ing] the Biblical context for the slave's choice." In sum,
Warner claims that Jacobs "ends the absence of a literary tradition for
the silenced black woman with an open text and a voice that, because it
questions the nature of official authority, will not silence others." This
rather postmodernist version of Jacobs is made to carry quite a critical
load as Incidents becomes the paradigm text for literary radicalism per
se.

While I do not wish to start a movement to silence Jacobs or deny the
great power of her book, I do want to note the problem with such an uncritical
celebration of it, especially when done in a language so full of our own
values and so distant from Jacobs's. I also wonder what authority is left
to Jacobs or her text when the final lesson to be learned is simply to
"question the nature of official authority." What, then, of Jacobs's authority,
especially as it has now become part of the official literary canon and
the official pedagogy? Is her authority unquestionable, even if we grant
that she was indisputably the author of Incidents? If Incidents
can be so massively adopted and institutionalized by courses in English,
History, Women's Studies, Ethnic Studies, et al., and become such a popular
textbook, what does this say about the book's power to be subversive and
resistant? Are the book's acts of resistance self-evident and univocal,
or must they be to some degree produced by and for readers through strategies
of interpretation? If many African Americans, especially students, object
to the constant equation of their race with the episode of slavery, does
teaching Incidents so repetitively go very far in undoing or subverting
the master narrative about racism in America? As Carla Peterson argues,
the use of Jacobs or even Harriet Wilson as the token text used to diversify
the curriculum or the critical study has the effect of obscuring the great
number of works in many genres written by African American women in the
nineteenth-century which may be at least equally deserving of our attention
(this is a paraphrase of a comment made by Peterson during her presentation
at the Hartford conference). In suggesting that we stop and resist the
overexposure of Incidents, then, I am asking less about its prior
history of being resisted and its demonstrable intention to thematize resistance
than I am, finally, asking about what kind of resistance we think we are
performing in studying and teaching it. Depending, of course, on who "we"
are.

One thing that the contemporary discussion of Jacobs has succeeded in
resisting is the category of the "sentimental." After Hazel Carby, the
term "sentimental" cannot be used without acknowledging the racial and
class limitations that hindered it in its original setting and subsequent
theoretical application. The debate over whether sentimental literature
is complicit with or resistant to patriarchy might be displaced by offering
a category other than the "sentimental" to define the major movement of
nineteenth-century literature by women. Even before the debate took off
in the 1980s, Nina Baym had already tried to do this in Woman's Fiction,
her title referring to a category of texts by women that expressed what
Baym called a "pragmatic feminism." "The many novels all tell," said Baym,
"a single tale. In essence, it is the story of a young girl who is deprived
of the supports she had rightly or wrongly depended on to sustain her throughout
life and is faced with the necessity of winning her way in the world" (11).
She does this by taking responsibility for her own destiny and demanding
more of herself in the process. Although these novels describe women's
degraded and dependent position in society, they also "insist that in nineteenth-century
America women have the opportunity and responsibility to change their situation
by changing their personalities" (19). The success of these stories with
a mass audience was achieved "by engaging and channeling the emotions of
the readers through identification with the heroine" (17).

Contrary to previous accounts of this literature, Baym argues that "these
novels see their old world as neither affectional nor domestic and they
hope to impose these values on a society that seems to them governed purely
by mercenary and exploitative considerations. They espouse a so-called
'cult of domesticity' but not as that cult is generally analyzed, as a
conservative or traditional ethos" (20). Domesticity, in other words, was
an agency of resistance for nineteenth-century women writers. Baym explicitly
rejects the descriptor "sentimental" in regards to this literature, since
it has accrued a host of negative and misleading connotations. Baym reminds
us that the "plots repeatedly identify immersion in feeling as one of the
great temptations and dangers for a developing woman. They show that feeling
must be controlled, and they exalt heroines who have as much will and intelligence
as emotion" (25).

Baym's effort to establish a revisionary history of "woman's fiction"
clearly established much of the foundation (and a lot of the specifics)
for Tompkins, though Baym's "pragmatic feminism" locates the cultural work
of her scholarship in a rather different space than Tompkins's new historicism.
Whereas Tompkins focuses more on theoretical questions of "power" and religious
discourse, Baym produces a more traditionally historical account of a broader
spectrum of texts addressing a range of social issues. And whereas Tompkins
believes that these novels "focus exclusively on the emotions, and specifically
on the psychological dynamics of living in a condition of servitude" (173),
Baym sees a plot in which a thoughtful heroine chooses self-development
over compliance and takes an active role in reforming not only what people
feel, but what they do.

Although Tompkins's book was titled Sensational Designs, it was
her work on what one chapter called "sentimental power" that proved most
influential. The term "sentimental" reentered critical discourse with a
new, more positive valuation that eventually overshadowed Baym's attempt
to replace "sentimental" with "woman's fiction." As I mentioned in regards
to Carby's work on Jacobs, this positive revaluation of the sentimental
has not been universally accepted. In her recent book The Wicked Sisters,
Betsy Erkkila reverts to using the term in almost uniformly negative ways
(her list of works cited does not include either Woman's Fiction or
Sensational Designs). According to Erkkila, "It was precisely this
rhetoric of female moral superiority, deployed by women reformers and popularized
by sentimental women writers of her time, that [Emily] Dickinson sought
to resist in representing herself as one of 'the bad ones,' who took pleasure
in being 'evil' rather than 'good'" (43).

Like the male Modernist critics, Erkkila values Dickinson for her resistance
to the sentimental; moreover, Erkkila makes her argument as part of her
own resistance to what she perceives as a rather sentimental movement in
contemporary feminist criticism, which she believes has wrongly identified
its cultural work with that of the nineteenth century novelists. Erkkila
contends that "recent feminist representations of women's literary history
have tended to romanticize, maternalize, essentialize, and eternalize women
writers" and so to reinforce "the very gender stereotypes and polarities
that have been historically the ground of women's oppression" (3). "Against
the tendency of earlier feminist critics to celebrate women writers and
the female literary tradition, and to heroize strong literary foremothers
and communities of women," writes Erkkila, "this book considers the historical
struggles and conflicts among women poets, as well as the problems of difference
and otherness among and within women poets themselves." This stress on
"problems of difference," especially those of race and class, marks Erkkila's
book as a post-1980s cultural work, influenced by the widespread critique
of white women's feminism first articulated by black women. After quoting
from Audre Lorde, Erkkila asserts that "the bonds of assistance and resistance
that women poets have formed with other women have also been bonds formed
by the exclusion, silencing, and demonization of other women -- particularly
women of another race, class, ethnicity, or sexual orientation" (14-15).

This is an old story, of course, dating back at least to the tensions
between black and white women in the abolitionist and suffragist movements
of the nineteenth century. When Erkkila tries to apply this attention to
"problems of difference" in the case of Emily Dickinson, the results are
ambivalent. On the one hand, Dickinson's linguistic resistance to patriarchy
and her creation of a sisterhood of readers are read positively by Erkkila
as important achievements; her formal departure from the poetic, economic,
and ideological laws of the fathers is seen as liberating. Here Dickinson
is seen as a compatriot of the novelists: "Like Catharine Sedgwick, Lydia
Sigourney, and other domestic novelists of the time, Dickinson set a familial
and essentially women-centered culture of affection and mutual nurturance
against the commercial ethos of self-interest and capital gains" (47).
On the other hand, Emily Dickinson was a white woman of middle-class privilege
utterly unconcerned with the vital social issues of her day: "the bonds
of assistance and resistance she formed with her women friends," asserts
Erkkila, "lacked any larger political reference" (49).

Holding Dickinson to the standards of political correctness, Erkkila
observes that Dickinson "manifested little concern about the problems of
slavery, industrialism, the urban poor, and the dispossession of American
Indians," problems that were addressed by Lydia Child, Helen Jackson, and
many other women writers, call them what you may (50).

Dickinson, then, turns out to be of good service in resisting narratives
of idealized female solidarity but relatively useless as a model for the
writer as political activist. Despite her own reference to the solid involvement
of American women writers in social issues, Erkkila's next sections contend
that Dickinson could find no helpful models of resistance in the "domestic
ideology" and "feminine" writing of her contemporaries, and so had to turn
to the Brontes, George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning for inspiration.
Of course these authors were not writing about the American political problems
that Dickinson ignored, and so it is hard to see why we should value Dickinson
for turning to them and in so doing resisting the American women writers
who were in fact addressing "the problems of slavery, industrialism, the
urban poor, and the dispossession of American Indians" (as Erkkila's final
look at Helen Jackson intimates). Perhaps some of the confusion here results
from not considering the complex relationship between these problems and
the genres of sentimental literature and domestic fiction. Rather than
participate in the dispute over whether nineteenth century women writers
were resistant to or complicit with the oppressive forces of their era,
Erkkila seems to say that they were both without explaining how this could
be.

I would return, then, to Nina Baym's suggestion that we avoid too much
reliance on the category of the "sentimental," since it appears to rejuvenate
unproductive impasses. Such a categorization also tends to overlook the
scholarship that has given us a much more diverse and complex picture of
the genres in which 19th century women wrote, and thus of the cultural
work that their texts performed. Today much productive criticism turns
our attention to travel writing, the sketch, and spiritual autobiography,
to name just three. Or take, for a particularly important example, Judith
Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse's anthology on American women regionalists.
"In creating this anthology," write the editors, "we are asserting the
existence of a tradition among nineteenth-century American women writers
that we term regionalism." Here "regionalism" becomes a heuristic term
for naming a writing practice that shares some of the qualities of "woman's
fiction," some of the values of "domestic ideology," some of the epistemologies
of the "sentimental," and yet which finally differs in its history, scope,
and effects from any of these. What distinguishes "regionalists" from "local
colorists," they argue, is "their desire not to hold up regional characters
to potential ridicule by eastern urban readers but rather to present regional
experience from within, so as to engage the reader's sympathy and identification"
(xii).

Most controversial, of course, is the editors' judgment that local color
writing is predominantly male, and that women created a distinct "regionalist"
tradition of their own. Like Baym, Fetterley and Pryse see identification
and empathy as central to the production and reception of woman-centered
texts: the "region" they write of, then, is as much one of sex and gender
as of geography. They readily acknowledge rehabilitating the distinction
between the "man's world" and "woman's sphere," since that distinction
was a lived material, social, and spiritual one for women of the nineteenth
century. Contra Erkkila, this is an historicist, not an essentialist, premise
on their part. Unlike Baym, they place less importance on plot than character,
and so look to the genre of the sketch more than that of the novel for
tales of women's lives.

Fetterley and Pryse share the stress that Tompkins placed on women's
agency and empowerment, though they locate this less in the tropes of religious
discourse than in the social and emotional possibilities established by
narrative structure: "the narrator" of regionalist fiction, they contend,
"frequently appears to be an inhabitant herself" of these women's spheres.
She does not undermine them with satire or judgment, but rather adopts
"the narrator's stance of careful listening" that "fosters an empathic
connection between the reader of the work and the lives the work depicts"
(xvii). This empathy, I think, is meant to be qualitatively different from
the unearned emotional sympathies criticized by Erkkila as too unreal a
foundation for women's community or political action (much less literary
accomplishment). And this empathy produces a different story than do interpretations
that focus on resistance. The regions of age, race, class, geography, and
sexual difference inhabited by the women in Fetterley and Pryse's anthology
exhibit a variety not found in much of "woman's fiction" or "sentimental
literature," at least as these have often been described. The woman-centered
character of the regionalist tradition retains an insistence on the specific
separateness of woman's experience and literary history without basing
these on transhistorical or dogmatic assertions about women's nature or
women's lives. The strong critique of masculinity and of patriarchy is
also retained as fundamental to the feminist lessons that these texts teach,
and which were often their consciously intended message.

Fetterley and Pryse, like all the critics I have cited, are honest about
the connections they see between the regions of literature they study and
the contemporary spaces of resistance and affiliation (social, political,
aesthetic, intellectual, academic) that they themselves inhabit. In their
conclusion to the introduction they affirm the cultural work that these
texts may do in our own time, and the time to come. This commitment to
doing women's literary history in conscious dialogue with the twin imperatives
of historical integrity and contemporary urgency is one I see shared by
most of the best work in our field. Whatever resistances lay ahead, I am
confident that this commitment will continue to produce new regions of
knowing as we move into the uncertain space of the future.